‘Lone Star Nation,’ by Richard Parker

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CreditLCDM Universal History Archive, via Getty Images

By Karen Olsson

Dec. 12, 2014

In 1923, Theodore H. Price, a New York cotton speculator and publisher, delivered a message to a group of advertising men at a convention in Corsicana, Tex.: that they should advertise Texas itself. By promoting the state’s “gloriously romantic history” — for Price, that was a racist story of Anglo-American triumph — they could lure new people and investment. Dallas business leaders took a shine to the idea and mounted the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition, at the same time that writers like J. Frank Dobie and Katherine Anne Porter were starting to represent Texas in works of fiction, history and collected folklore. If the 19th century had been marked by the pioneers’ struggle to settle Texas physically, in the 20th century their successors tried to settle its meaning.

Both efforts met with stiff resistance. Just as the inhospitable, semi-arid land thwarted the hopes of many newcomers, the mythic, cowboyish version of Texas has outlasted all sorts of attempts to tame it with realism. People know the burnished legend of the Texas Rangers better than they do the reassessment contained in Américo Paredes’s remarkable study “With His Pistol in His Hand,” published in 1958. Larry McMurtry wrote a half-dozen fine novels about the decline of ranching and the rise of urban Texas before winning the Pulitzer Prize for his cattle-drive opus, “Lonesome Dove.” While there’s some question as to what the lone star on the state flag was supposed to stand for back in 1839, that makes it all the more apt as a symbol of Texas: bold and proud and a little vague in the particulars.

Texas in the 21st century remains a powerful brand, even more marketable than it was in Price’s time. And so it comes as no surprise to read in the acknowledgments of Richard Parker’s “Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America” that his New York literary agent helped him select “just the right topic, Texas.” At least he’s candid about it. Every year seems to bring more books aiming to explain that Texas is not what we thought it was or that the state might offer some an object lesson for the rest of the country. If, as the proliferation of these books implies, there’s a steady hunger out there for Texas debunked and delineated, Parker’s short book caters to lighter appetites: It’s a tray of Texas nibbles. Included are a capsule history of the state; personal reminiscence and travels; policy analysis; a look at the 2014 governor’s race; and man-on-the-street (or woman-in-the-Starbucks) interviews, not to mention a list of 300 famous Texans and three pages of Texas-related quotations.

The book tends to bow under the weight of the author’s many impulses. It’s too bad he didn’t jettison some of them, like his framing of Texas history as a series of six migrations of peoples to the state. The scheme marginalizes two of the most significant 20th-century demographic trends — the movement of rural Texans to cities and suburbs and the continuing arrival of Mexican immigrants — and Parker gives transplants from the Rust Belt (his “fifth migration”) too much credit for Texas’ having turned Republican. He is most engaging when he writes from his own experience, yet his travels often yield too little. He drives to Missouri City, a thriving Houston suburb that Rice University researchers have identified as an unusually diverse community, but he doesn’t offer any reporting or insight once he gets there, instead sketching its history and then moving on.

An El Paso native who left the state as a young man, Parker came back to central Texas in 1999, and he wants to tell us how much the place has changed in the years since, largely because of new or returning residents like himself. Some four million people have relocated to Texas in the last 14 years — Parker’s “sixth migration” — a large majority of them moving to the urbanized area spanned by San Antonio, Austin, Dallas and Houston. Meanwhile, young Hispanics make up an increasing share of the population, compared with non-Hispanic whites.

Parker overstates the case by claiming that until 2000, Texas seemed immutable. (“In the late 1990s, Texas didn’t feel all that different to most people, particularly old-line Texans,” he writes. Surely an old-line Texan born on a cotton farm in 1930 would disagree.) He’s on more solid ground when he outlines the challenges of the Texas population boom: namely, how to educate the young — in a state where Republican leaders have been more concerned with arming teachers than expanding public education and controlling tuition costs — and how to satisfy growing water demands in a region afflicted by periodic droughts, never mind climate change.

Parker comes across as a kind of affable tour guide at a major attraction, who explains what’s there in front of you without going too deep. His take-home message, that the problems and opportunities in Texas are the nation’s writ large, is reminiscent of an old quip from Molly Ivins. Texas, she used to say, is just like anyplace else in America, only more so.

Karen Olsson’s second novel, “All the Houses,” will be published in the fall.